The IRAS point-source catalog provides a unique opportunity to generate a galaxy catalog uniformly selected over most of the sky (greater than 9.5 sr). Such a catalog of 6730 sources has been generated, and a small (4 percent - 7 percent) but robust dipole anisotropy in the galaxy distribution that points towards l = 235 deg, b = 45 deg, within 30 deg of the microwave dipole anisotropy is found. Angular correlation analysis suggests that subsets of the catalog have characteristic distances D asterisk approximately 50-100 per h Mpc. The good agreement in direction of these dipoles suggests that the IRAS galaxies roughly trace the large-scale mass distribution, that the microwave dipole velocity is mostly induced by the local supercluster (cz less than 3000 km/s), and that the indicated cosmological density is high (Omega 0.5). A more precise estimate will require a full-sky redshift survey.
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Meiksin et al. (1986) studied this question.